I hope your heart center is feeling soft and open today, because I’m about to throw some love at you. 19 photographs of it, in fact! But don’t worry, they’re optimized so they should load pretty fast. Just keep reading while that’s happening.

Emily and Matt got hitched at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Joseph in San Jose, a stunning place to launch into married life if ever there was one. That place is gorgeous. We were worried about the light, wondering if there would be enough, since we couldn’t use flashes during the ceremony and wanted to avoid using them anyway (we are big fans of natural light). As it turned out, the light situation was challenging but not impossible. We got plenty of great shots just working with what was there.

The Red Bats had the pleasure of following these two throughout their wedding day, starting at 7 am (yes, we will get up early for our clients!) and ending up at the Capitol Club in the afternoon. It was a small wedding, just the family and some friends, and this made it easy to focus on the bride and groom and their delight in every detail of getting legally wed. They were so happy about the whole thing, so sweet to each other and everybody else, that they made falling in love and getting married seem like the only logical thing for anybody in their right mind to do.

It was easy to see they both felt they’d hit the jackpot in the romance department. Working on their photos later, I kept getting teary-eyed looking at the two of them together. (Have I mentioned yet what a cheeseball I am? Well, now you know for sure.) I’m not including the most touching photos here because some moments are too private for a blog post.

But I will reveal, in words anyway, that the bride’s father cried during his first dance with his newly married daughter, and almost everybody in the room cried too (including me) and I am sure the ones who didn’t were either not paying attention or holding it in. I told you these were some sweet people.

Congratulations, Emily and Matt!

Hello, the Internet!  I am feverishly working on a SECRET PROJECT (which will be revealed shortly), but in the meantime, I need to post some photos!  In keeping with the recent theme of travel, the first photo is one of my favorite travel photos.  It was taken in Scotland in 2006 on the Isle of Lewis.

The Isle of Lewis is off the western coast of Scotland, is a 2 hour ferry ride from Scotland proper, and is the last bit of land between the UK and Iceland.  Also, it’s cold and windy.  But very, very beautiful!  The photo below was taken in a black house.  You can read more about black houses here, and even see the same room I photographed.

The second photo is of the back of a duck’s head.  Because I like ducks.

Because I had the chance to do lots of photographing with real cameras during March and April, I kind of forgot about the camera on my phone. But when I Bluetoothed photos from my phone to my computer today, I realized there were enough for a post. Heck yeah!

For those of you who are new to our blog: I post pictures taken with my cellphone every month (or two), and every now and then Patrick posts a few of his own cellphone pics (taken with a much fancier cellphone). Click here to see previous cellphone pic posts (opens in a new window). No claim is being made here that these cellphone pics are of high quality, nor is any attempt made to tone down their junky weirdness. Nor are we implying, as Patrick mentioned in a previous post, that we would ever take your wedding pictures with our cellphone cameras. Unless you wanted us to, of course.

So, back to March and April: I can hardly wait to show you more photos taken with real cameras, but what with one thing and another it’s taking a long time to get those done. The cellphone pics, on the other hand, take almost no time at all to import and process. I pick random presets from my Develop Presets folder in Lightroom and just slap ‘em on and that’s all there is to it. Makes me feel like being a photographer is easy, for a few minutes anyway.

TO SEE THIS MONTH’S EXCITING SELECTIONS PLEASE CLICK THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE PHOTO BELOW.